Hogging the CPU: Pandoc-crossref is slow

6 December 2016

I have been using GNU make and Makefile from (Kieran
Healy)[https://github.com/kjhealy/pandoc-templates/blob/master/examples/Makefile]
to convert my .md files into .pdf. By magic the process draws on my
.bib file to create the necessary citations and references. That is
all well and good, but my .bib file has over 5,000 items in it. As a
result, pandoc-crossref works really really hard for a long time. And
so the process is a tad slow, to say the least.

With a bit of sluething, the solution seems to be to extract the
required entries from my master .bib file, and put them in a small
(local to each project) .bib file.